Favorites

Its been a year since "The Stolen Scream"video was published here on Fstoppers- and what a crazy year it was since then. In this post I will update you on some of what happened with this story. The video was viewed over 330,000 times, and the story itself was featured in many big news outlets (Gizmodo, Time, American Photo Mag, MSNBC and others), and became a case study in many colleges around the world. Its even on Wiki now.

10-15 years ago, if you were a talented creative person, there was a very good chance that you would never be discovered. Without the push from a big record label very few people would every be able to hear your music. Unless you could sign with a producer you would never be able to raise the millions necessary to make a movie. The internet has changed all of that; and you no longer have an excuse.

Realm Pictures has been working on "The Underwater Realm" (one of the most ambitious indie film attempts I've ever seen) for months now and have been coming out with great BTSVs along the way. The team recently realized that they need to film parts of their movie in an underwater studio and to do this they need to raise more funds. The team has turned to Kickstarter.com to help out but they aren't just asking for money. If you pledge $50 you will receive a special edition copy of their movie "Zomblies" and 10 in-depth video tutorials on indie film making tips like the one below. In the video below Dave shows us how to make a safe and explosion on an indie budget. If you feel like helping these guys out head over to Kickstarter and pledge today.

There are a ton of car photographers out there but very few of them are this good. Lee Howell just sent me his newest portfolio shoot that involved shooting a new Audi R8 GT in a soon to be opened tunnel. Lee got his hands on one of the craziest car rigs I have ever seen and walks us through the basics of his production. With a little bit of post work, the images become world class shots. Head over to Lee's website to get more info and pictures.

The final day to submit your behind the scenes video for our contest is December 31st. With 30 days left, the videos are starting to pour in and they are getting better and better. I've never had any interested in infrared photography until I saw Mark Fore's contest entry. In the video below Mark shows us how he converted his digital rebel into an infrared camera for $6. He then takes pictures lighting his subjects with the Xbox Kinect. To learn how to turn your camera into an IR system, check out this website.

After almost a year of work we have finally finished Peter Hurley: The Art Behind The Headshot. We created this to be a double DVD tutorial and we may eventually still make a physical copy but for now we have decided to begin with a digital download. I would like to thank each one of you that supported us by pre-ordering this video and I am so sorry it took so long to produce. Patrick and I filmed and edited this and it was far more complicated than we ever imagined. Creating this video has been the hardest project I have ever worked on but at the same time one of the most rewarding. During the 5 days of filming this video Peter completely opened my eyes to a new way of shooting people. Peter helped me look past the technical side of the camera and the lighting to see the emotion and feeling that each of his clients were producing in each image. When his clients weren't producing compelling images, Peter knew exactly how to coach them into creating that perfect "look." This experience has changed my photography more profoundly than any other experience in my life and I hope that everyone who watches this video will feel the same way. Fstoppers is full of new and free information every single day including the first video we did with Peter over a year ago. This video was created with the professional photographer in mind and it costs $300 for a digital download of the 4 hour video. We know that many of our readers are photography hobbyists and if you don't shoot professionally you may not see the value in this download and that is fine. Please realize that this is a tool and a piece of education that will help (some) professionals take their business to the next level. If you don't see the value in it, please do not buy it and enjoy all of the other free material on our site. If you do decide to buy this video, I would like to thank you so much for supporting this venture and Fstoppers.com. Never in a million years would I have thought we (two wedding photographers from South Carolina) could have created a 4 hour tutorial of this complexity. I know we will never make enough money from DVD sales to make up for the time spent producing it (for some reason we thought it would only take a few weeks to edit) but I hope that this video will impact the photographers who watch it in a huge way.

As many of you know I (Lee Morris) am a professional wedding photographer. I was never a big fan of wedding videos until I saw the work that StillMotion was putting out. Even if you hate weddings you can appreciate what they do simply from an artistic standpoint. Even though I loved their work, I actually found it discouraging because I knew I could never do their style of video as well as they could so I never tried to film a wedding. I had the idea for over a year of shooting a wedding video similar to how I shoot stills. If I could slow down the video enough I could deal with basically a moving image, something that I felt a lot more comfortable with. It finally worked out that Patrick Hall had a wedding on a day that I was free and 3 days before the wedding I ran the idea by the bride and then called my buddy Mike to see if he wanted to help me film it. Check out the finished product below and the walk-through in the full post.

As a photographer with a new DSLR, you might be trying your hand at video production. Most people completely overlook audio and they shouldn't. If a video sounds cheap then in most people's minds, it is cheap. If you don't have enough money to afford fancy lav mics, don't worry, you can record clean audio with a number of devices that you may already own. In the video below I will show you how we did it for the first year we filmed videos for Fstoppers with a simple (and free) iPhone app. If you don't have a smart phone then you can buy one of these for $16.

Ryan Enn Hughes just submited his entry for our BTSV contest and it is quite impressive. Ryan teamed up with The Big Freeze and set up 48 D700 cameras in a circle and then fired them all at once as dancers did their thing. The photographs are pretty cool on their own but the real magic happened in post during the editing phase when Ryan teamed up with sound designers at Zelig Sound to create two incredible 30 seconds videos. Obviously this is an extremely high budget project but our contest will not be judge on that so don't be discouraged if you don't have 48 $3000 cameras to play with. As always, you can check out all of the submissions to our contest as they come in here on our forum.

If you have seen Peter Lik's work in person then you understand that it's impossible to put into words the look and quality of his prints. Peter's photography (and his post production) is fantastic, but what really makes his work stand out is his printing and presentation. If his images were printed on standard photo paper at a standard size, his work would not have the same "wow" factor.

Tom Guilmette is now a pretty regular name on Fstoppers because his BTSVs in the field of video are some of the best we have seen. In the video below Tom travels out west with Eric Kessler to film BTS footage of some of the top timelapse shooters of our time. My personal favorite is Tom Lowe and we haven't heard much from him in the last year because he is still working on his timelapse feature film. Check out the video below to learn from the best.

A few weeks ago Reese Moore interviewed Jimmy Chin for her column the Fstoppers Spotlight. Her Fstoppers interview revealed a lot about what makes Mr. Chin put himself in harms way as he climbs, rappels, and base jumps from assignment to assignment. In this behind the scenes video, Jimmy talks about the changing culture taking place within the sport of extreme rock climbing. He and his fellow climbers explore Yosemite National Park as he captures images for National Geographic. I dabble in climbing and think base jumping would be a huge thrill but I'm not sure I would ever have the guts to even hang with Jimmy for one day if this is his typical photoshoot. Check out 2:40 for some interesting off camera lighting while climbing!

Assistants, aka "voice activated light stands", can be a wealth of knowledge and experience if you are fortunate enough to have access to one that's been around. It's not entirely unheard of, to meet an assistant that knows their lighting better than the photographer they are working for. If only one of them would create a blog about their BTS exploits... wait a minute. What do we have here?

Giving back to photographers has always been a big part of what makes Fstoppers such a great community. Soon after we launched last year, Lee and I decided it would be fun to see what you, our readers, would come up with. Our first Fstoppers Behind the Scenes Video Contest was a tremendous success with over 90 BTS videos submitted by the FS online community (we even added Sean to our team after seeing his video)! Last year we gave away a Canon 7D as the winning prize but this year is going to blow that out of the water as we have over $20,000 in prizes. Want to find out what you have to do to win all this gear? Click the Full Post for the current 2011 Fstoppers Behind The Scenes Contest!

Visual Masterpiece is back with another BTSV of their latest wedding video and once again, it's top notch. Not only are these guys amazingly good videographers, but they also know how to make an informative video. It appears that the most used piece of gear was the Cinevate Atlas 10. I own and love the Atlas 10 but since I like traveling light, I prefer the new Atlas FLT.